Technology

Or they work somewhat, resp. in some cases and the rest is make believe in execeutives, a waste of money. Let's say 50/50?

No one likes being manipulated. I like ads that promote healthy living for example, if they don't secretly promote any brand or product. They are pretty rare though, almost only in some public health care facilities.

I've seen a few ads recently that are just random as hell, don't say a product name and don't even have a website or link to find out what it is even advertising. They always make me wonder how they're working, if they're working. They seem like just a waste of money and time for everyone involved, including the advertiser themselves.

The sad thing is: ads dont need to be liked to work. Making enjoyable ads is expensive, making annoying ads that still work is cheaper

well, as long as the companies buying the ads think they work, we have an industry

My wife worked for a company that was heavily reliant on generating leads from ads. They had lots of real time monitoring of conversion rates to make sure they were actually making more money than they were spending on the ads. They would have to turn ad channels off all the time because the return on ad spend went negative.

So my conclusion is that ads can be somewhat effective for companies, but if they don't actively monitor and control the performance of their ads, they're probably just burning money. A lot of companies seem to advertise because they think that's the only way to grow.

People accepted unobtrusive ads, it's once they started taking over the actual content that they became a big no-no. The ad companies and ad-reliant websites fucked themselves.

The problem started when they went from a basic preroll ad, to unskippable and then the large amount of mid-roll ads to push people into buying premium just as they increased the price.

I think you're giving companies too much credit. Freakonomics did a series called "Does Advertising Actually Work?" and the tl;dr was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/

NewPipe had to update a couple of times in the past month because YouTube made changes that broke the 3rd party playback. First time it took a few days, but so far it seems they've been able to keep up with YouTube's bs.

I worry for a day when YouTube figures out how to make ads an unskippable part of the video itself so that they're present with or without adblock, while also maintaining the ability to update them as needed.

This is the same cat and mouse game hackers have been doing with game-/anticheat developers since multiplayer games became a thing

Are people still cheating? Yes

So unless google manages to pull of their device certification fuckery for PCs it will never work out in their favor

Thank you for reminding me of this!

It's wasn't that long ago that I was in a little lamborghini, and sleeping on bookshelves.

Sure they know! Every level of middle managers knows exactly what the status of the graphs of goals and progress of their team!

Someone has apparently toyed with the idea of using AI to detect sponsor segments in subtitles to generate sponsorblock segments. I don't think it went anywhere though.